FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  Finally, it was time to see Vera. Agents had already been to the rehab to break the news of my return to her in person. They’d answered her questions with the official story, which I’d sworn to dutifully repeat.

  I was nervous as the sprawling facility came into sight. I was driving my own car and wearing my own clothes. My hair had been cut by a stylist, and I’d put on a few pounds. The gifts for my mother from her Russian family and the video that Lena and I had made were stowed in my bag. But I didn’t feel right. The world I was now inhabiting was strangely brilliant, busy, and lavish. Everything seemed to be moving at twice the normal rate of speed. I’d referred to myself as Anne-Marie Phipps several times, and on a couple of occasions had glanced down and imagined that my feet were encased in heavy, blood-stained socks. I wondered if I’d ever fit in to my old life again.

  Vera was waiting in her usual place, just inside the glass doors of the main entrance, when I came up the path. A pretty scarf was draped over her shoulders. She looked an awful lot like Katarina in that moment, except for the fact that both her hands were visible in her lap. The automatic door opened for me with a gentle whoosh, and I went to her.

  “Hi,” I said, crouching down to be on her level.

  “You didn’t have to take so long to come home,” she said, trying to be old-lady peevish.

  “I found Katarina Melnikova,” I said excitedly. “I have so much to tell you.”

  “Not yet. First, let me look at you.”

  In the silence that followed our eyes met and filled with tears.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom,” I said.

  “For what?” She seemed surprised.

  “For everything.” For leaving her alone so long. For making her worry. For spending so many years of my life believing that every cruel disease I encountered, every pain and unhappiness, most of all her own, was somehow mine to cure.

  “Oh, Natalie. What are you thinking? I’m the luckiest woman alive.”

  My nameplate was still on the door to the suite at the George Washington University Medical Center, and my office was dusty but intact. My sickest patients had scattered, of necessity, to different doctors, but many of the people who saw me only once or twice a year hadn’t even noticed I was gone. A lighter workload seemed to be the main effect of the more than three months I’d been away.

  At the end of my first week back, I met with Joel to review the files of the patients I’d referred to him. Our discussion was brisk and to the point, peppered with the medical language we both spoke so well. Out of nowhere, I experienced a sense of déjà vu: everything I was hearing and seeing—his melodic voice, his familiar urgency, the precise way he tilted his head when he posed a question, the very words coming out of his mouth—had happened a hundred times before. He had been such a vital part of my younger life. I realized what an unparalleled blessing it was to have loved a person you also greatly admired.

  As he straightened the folders, he asked a bit hesitantly, without quite looking at me, “How are you doing, Natalie?”

  “Very good,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. I stayed in Russia a little longer than I expected to.”

  “I know.”

  “I met my grandmother.”

  “Really?” He perked up at this because it put us on safe ground. “And how was that?”

  “It was excellent. A bit taxing emotionally because she has Alzheimer’s. But my aunt and a cousin were there, too, so I learned a lot about her life from them. Mother’s thrilled, as you can imagine.”

  “Of course.” He knew my family history better than anyone. “I’m happy for you.”

  “Thanks.” I drew a breath. “And you. I hear congratulations are in order.”

  He smiled. “We’re delighted. It’s still early, of course. We’re just through the first trimester.”

  “I hope all goes well. You’ll be a wonderful father, Joel.”

  He looked at me kindly, and I saw that he was trying to find some words. But there was nothing more to say.

  There was no pregnancy for me, which was disappointing at first. But as I re-connected with colleagues and patients, I came to believe it was for the best.

  A week or two later, I called Detective Ruggeri, who informed me that there’d been no progress in Saldana’s case. Soon after, I received a package in the mail—a large, slightly crushed cardboard box with an NYPD return address. Inside was a jumble of athletic wear, street clothes, and miscellaneous items. Saldana’s personal effects. A note from Ruggeri stated that the items deemed to be evidence in the homicide investigation had been bagged and stored at precinct headquarters. The remaining items, having not been claimed by the Russian Consulate as was customary in such situations, were being shipped to me as next of kin. The impersonal tone of his message sounded distinctly like a wrapping-up.

  Neither Misha nor I could bear to go through the box, so I re-folded the cardboard flaps and stashed it on the floor of the hall closet. At that point, Misha was staying in my spare bedroom. He was enrolled in an English immersion course at GW that he was about to flunk for lack of attendance. Instead of going to class, he spent his time making friends in the Russian community in D.C., an activity at which he excelled. He worked evenings doing valet parking at a fancy downtown hotel, another activity at which he excelled, if you could call driving very expensive cars very fast up and down the narrow ramps of a city parking garage excelling. Misha was perfectly maddening in his way: he absolutely refused to take his future seriously. But he was also very good company, always positive and energetic. He did what no one had done for a long time: he made me laugh.

  Soon, the winter holidays were just a week away. The temperature hovered around freezing, and precipitation came down as either rain or snow, sometimes as both. Dirty slush was packed against the curbs, and the air had the kind of damp, penetrating chill that quickly seeped through woolen coats and scarves.

  One night, I dug out my ceramic Christmas tree with the flashing colored bulbs and set it up in its usual place on the end table next to the couch. Then I wrapped the gifts I’d bought for my mother and stacked them by the door in preparation for the holiday. I knew that the terrible ache inside me was my longing for Dmitri, but I wasn’t allowed to contact him, not ever again. I had tried books, television, even the medical journals that once so reliably occupied my mind. But nothing had been able to quell my lonely restlessness. Sometimes when I closed my eyes, I could feel his warm, smooth skin under my fingertips, and I wondered if anything that true and good would ever happen to me again.

  It got late, past the time that Misha usually went to bed, yet his light was on in his room, and I could hear louder-than-usual noises coming from inside. I was curious about what he was doing, but I wanted to give him his privacy, so I didn’t say anything. Then I heard a sharp cry that sounded like pain and joy combined.

  I went to his door and knocked. “Misha, are you okay?”

  The door opened. His face was red and his eyes burned with intensity. Laid out on his bed were woolen leg warmers, worn-out ballet slippers, and a couple of pairs of toe shoes wrapped with pink satin ribbons. Sweaters, jeans, old rubber flip-flops, a beaded make-up bag, and toiletries with Cyrillic labeling. A Russian-English pocket dictionary and a zippered vinyl binder of language-learning CDs. The box from the NYPD was open on the floor.

  “Oh, Misha. I’m so sorry,” I said, assuming that the sight of Saldana’s belongings had spurred a fresh round of grief.

  He shook his head to tell me I was wrong and wordlessly handed me a laptop I had loaned him. I perched on the edge of the bed to read the document that was open on the screen. It was in Russian, a lot of lists, and I was too tired to decipher it myself.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the monograph. Kosloff’s monograph,” he said excitedly.

  I looked closer, at a column of names and dates—1952, 1953.

  He said, “They’re all here, all the files I emailed Saldana, including t
he photos of the prison camp.”

  I looked up at him, incredulous. “Where did you find them?”

  He picked the vinyl binder of language CDs off the bed and waved it in front of me. “In here. She copied everything onto a flash drive and hid it in here, in one of the pockets where you put CDs.” As if I wouldn’t believe him, he opened the binder and showed me how the CDs fit into tight plastic sleeves.

  “Do you think she knew what was in the files?”

  “I have no idea. I labelled them as choreography for different pieces. I thought for sure she wouldn’t open them. She always hated to learn dance that way.”

  I checked the title on the menu bar. Choreography, Grande Pas de deux, Paquita.

  I said, “She must have opened them and realized they were dangerous.”

  He nodded, too overcome to speak.

  I shut the laptop and placed it gently on the bed among Saldana’s things. How brave she was, I thought, to have copied the files and hidden them away. As if she knew something might happen.

  “What are going to do?” I asked.

  He smiled broadly. “I’m going to send my article to the Washington Post.”

  Of course. It was so like him not to miss a beat. “You’ll have to translate it first,” I reminded my young truant.

  We’d always spoken to each other in Russian, but now he switched to English. “You will be help to me, no?”

  I looked at him standing there, so full of vitality and purpose, and something deep inside me opened. “I’ll always help you,” I said.

  Read other books by Elisabeth Elo

  This book touches on an array of topics I knew nothing about when I started writing—chemical weapons treaties, Russian drinking toasts, specific surgical procedures, to name a few. I found most of the information I needed in readily available general sources. But there were three areas in which I needed to go deeper, and in these cases, I was helped immeasurably by the impressive works of particular scholars. The first is Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer prize-winning Gulag, a stunning and exhaustive chronicle of a dark chapter in Russian history. Second is Piers Vitebsky’s remarkable The Reindeer People, a mix of anthropology, memoir, and travelogue that brings to vivid life an ancient nomadic culture that is struggling to regain a foothold in the far north. Third is Laura Piacentini’s brave Surviving Russian Prisons, which raises the curtain on a hidden corner of a secretive society. These books were critical touchstones for me as I tried to create a fictional world that, while taking necessary liberties, remained as grounded as possible in the real one.

  Observations of Yakutsk and Cherkeh came out of my own travels there. My deep appreciation goes to my generous Russian hosts. My treatment of Mirny relied on published sources and is generally accurate with one notable exception: I added a chemical plant. Descriptions of Butugychag are based on the photographs and written accounts of Russian travelers and bloggers. Distances, routes, and travel times across Siberia are approximate.

  I am lucky to be blessed with wonderful friends and colleagues who took the time to nudge this book into progressively better shape. Linda Barnes, Shannon Kirk, Holly Robinson, Leonard Rosen, Hank Phillippi Ryan, and Joanna Schaffhausen enriched this book in significant ways. It is a pleasure and an honor to share this journey with them. Kudos to my sister, Dr. Carolyn Harrington, who signed off on the medical details. And I am ever grateful to my agent, Esmond Harmsworth, whose faith in me and my work is an invaluable gift. To Jason Pinter and the good people at Polis Books—thank you for every large and small thing you did to bring this book to life. Finally, my love eternally flows to the three special people who bring color and warmth to my world: Robert, Ben, and Ellen Sophia.

  Elisabeth Elo grew up in Boston. She has worked as an editor, an advertising copywriter, a high-tech project manager, and a halfway house counselor, and now teaches writing in the Boston area. Her essays and short stories have appeared in a variety of publications. She lived next to the ocean for many years and now resides in Brookline, Massachusetts. She is the author of the acclaimed novel North of Boston. Learn more about Elisabeth at www.elisabethelo.com.

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